Tuesday, December 28, 2010

He's a growing boy.

The way Huck reacts when I open the cabinet with the food in it, you'd think we were starving him to death.

He dashes into the kitchen, then jogs back to the office, weaving between my ankles, hoping I'll trip. As I start pouring the food into the bowl, he will thrust his head forward and start crunching, oblivious to the stream of kibble pouring onto the back of his head and streaming off his ears.

I will then go out into the dining room, where the other food bowl is, and top it up, too. It's usually still more than half full, proof that he wasn't particularly hungry, but as Huck hears the sound of kibble being poured, he comes running out of the office to try and get some of the fresh chow out here. Once I'm done pouring, he's done eating. It's not so much the food he gets excited about, as it is the act of being fed.

He's growing like a weed, and still rangy; he has yet to grow into his snowshoe feet and he's already only a few inches away from being able to grab doorknobs between his paws. I'm afraid I'm going to wake up one morning with him trying to get my head in his mouth so he can drag me up a tree on the Serengeti...

The abandoned and feral cats that we've adopted in the past have usually taken a few months to begin taking the presence of food for granted. Until that point they would gorge as soon as the food was available. I think part of it is a survival instinct and part of it is their wonder and delight at the appearance of food that they didn't have to hunt or forage for.

Sounds a lot like our blobular orange tabby...he started out as a starving, abandoned kitten with enormous catcher's-mitt paws. He's a now a well-insulated, indoor/outdoor guy who still panics when his food bowl is empty.

I don't think he'll ever get over the abandonment trauma, but the requirement to hunt for a living in his early days has made him a great hunter...when he feels like it.

You may have to curtail his food availability to keep him from getting chunky, like our guy.

I got in last night at a little past 11; kitty usually gets fed at a little past six. She was sweet and loving and happy to see me, and mostly just stayed underfoot until I went to her bowl. Then the gloves came off.

She's very passive-aggressive when she's not being just plain aggressive.

Kibbles, and all the other varieties of dry foods get stale and rank (to a cats nose) fairly quickly, and your mouse-assassin's nose was designed to know the difference between fresh and stale. I suspect he wants to eat the freshly-poured stuff before it starts smelling like the day-old stuff, or gets smell-contaminated by it. All our cats always preferred fresh to day-old, and would only eat down to the day-old level. Eventually, we always ended up throwing the day-old stuff in the bottom half of the bowl (which becomes week-old fairly quickly) out, and starting over with a clean, washed, food bowl. We found that we actually ended up saving food by cleaning the bowl out and washing it at least every other day.

We also stopped buying the super-jumbo-sized food bags because the food goes stale (to the cats nose) long before the bag reaches its buy-more-of-me-before-you-run-out level. The smaller bags weren't as economical, but a happy kitty was more important to me than saving a couple of bucks.

This becomes more important as the cat gets older, and their sense of smell starts to go. If they can't smell that it's food, they won't eat it, so you end up buying more "fragrant" food than when they were younger.

Security Staff(Jr.) is almost a year old now, has never missed a meal in the time I've had him, yet that dog still attacks his food bowl and crouches over it likeHe hasn't eaten in days,"You'll take it if I don't!"